Jeff Montgomery, one of the organizers of the AthFest summer music festival and founder of athensmusic.net, shows off a guitar signed by members of some of the Athens music scene's earliest bands. Montgomery was the winning bidder for the guitar, auctioned Saturday at a fund-raiser for diabetes research.

Travis Long/Staff

Athens gets to keep a piece of its history -- as scribbled on the front of a green Fender Stratocaster guitar -- and the city has Jeff Montgomery to thank for it.

Montgomery is a primary organizer of AthFest, Athens' summertime downtown music festival, and founder of athensmusic.net, an online information source for the Athens music scene.

He got the guitar, signed by members of the seminal local rock bands of the late '70s and early '80s -- R.E.M., Love Tractor, Pylon and the B-52's, among others -- at an auction during the Playing for a Cure juvenile diabetes benefit Saturday night at the Morton Theatre.

Montgomery spent $3,400 on the guitar. He said he bid on it because he felt strongly that it needed to stay in Athens.

''It's still sort of surreal that I have it,'' said the self-professed local music lover and ''collector geek.'' ''I'll get a dose of reality when I get that next credit card statement.''

Organizers of the benefit, designed to raise awareness of juvenile diabetes and funds for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, originally placed the guitar up for bid on eBay, an online auction service. The guitar was placed on eBay with a set reserve price, meaning that if a minimum price set by organizers was not met, the guitar did not have to be sold.

When the reserve price wasn't met after a week, organizers opted to auction the guitar at the Saturday benefit, a concert featuring local musicians and auctions of other local-band memorabilia.

While the reserve price wasn't met, 27 bids were placed on the guitar. The highest bid was for more than $2,000.

Maureen McGinley, benefit organizer and former manager of the B-52's, would not disclose the reserve price, but did say the guitar was shipped all over the country, sometimes at the expense of the artists themselves, gathering 42 signatures from former Athens musicians.

''Pete Buck signed it the day he left for England to go to his trial,'' said McGinley. Buck appeared in a British courtroom earlier this year to answer charges stemming from his behavior on a British Airways flight in April 2001. Buck was acquitted of the charges.

McGinley said the bands were enthusiastic about the guitar-signing project.

''The bands just got behind it without hesitation, which I think is what made so many of the first wave of Athens bands so special -- everybody was always helping everybody else,'' she said.

Organizers hope the benefit is the first in what will become a yearly event to raise money for diabetes research.

''We're incorporated and we have a bank account,'' McGinley said of Playing for a Cure. ''I can tell you we'll have an Athens Guitar II and III in the future -- this one was from 1973-83, the next will be '83-'93 and then '93-2000.''

Mark Smith, who dreamed up the idea of the benefit with his wife, Susie, after learning to cope as the parent of a child with diabetes, said the benefit raised roughly $30,000.

''Everything just aligned perfectly,'' said Smith, former drummer with The Squalls, an early-era Athens band. ''(My daughter) Megan got to be on stage with me -- it was something to be holding onto her and talking about it.''

Montgomery said he may offer the guitar to the Georgia Music Hall of Fame for its summer Athens Music exhibit, but for now is content to bask in the glow of his treasure, which sits on a table at his home.